21st century Dickens

Jan10

Sally Minogue considers Little Dorrit in the light of a ‘radical’ adaptation on BBC Radio 4

It’s easy enough to see why it seemed a good idea to
translate Dickens’ brilliant exploration of poverty, debt and desolation to our
current times. The clear message of this new adaptation (directed by Polly
Thomas and Jenny Sealy) was that some of us are still living in Victorian times
and in conditions that the masterly writer stamped with his own name –
Dickensian. We still have the same
levels of degradation imposed on one class by another, and the same social
imprisonment. For the high walls of the Marshalsea, we have instead an ailing
tower block, for the debtors’ prison the dark threats of the loan shark, for
new riches the money provided for Amy’s university fees, and for the
Circumlocution Office – the Job Centre (that last is a perfect fit). But instead of the always little Dorrit,
the adaptors April de Angelis and Nicola Werenowska give us a proudly independent
AmyDorrit (if still a ‘short
arse’); studying the novel for A level, Amy takes strong issue with ‘the
wimpiest, most submissive heroine in the history of English literature’ – after
whom her father has named her.

This is one of the ways in which the adaptation
interrogates the text (albeit at a pretty low level). The drama is interlocuted
by brief readings of key passages, and occasional critical comments – in Amy’s
view the fictional Little Dorrit is ‘a figment of a Victorian male repressed
imagination’, and she is certainly not going to conform to that stereotype. The
listener who knows the novel can pick up a running critique as an insistent
multiculturalism and gender equality replace the nineteenth-century norms. In
this the company who perform the drama, Graeae Theatre (in collaboration with
Naked Production) replicate their own pluralist ethic and aesthetic, bringing
together disabled, learning disabled and non disabled actors. Mrs. Clennam
becomes Mrs Chaudury – leader of the council and using her political powers to
be in on a good property deal. Her son Arthur is a budding journalist; as in
the novel, he is at odds with his mother, but this version shows him to have
the same self-interested motives. While he ostensibly lends support to the
tower block residents’ resistance to having their building possessed for
redevelopment, he has an eye to his own career advancement by getting a good
story. Maggy, who in the novel can’t manage alone and depends on Little Dorrit
as her ‘little mother’, takes a prominent role and is played by a learning
disabled actor. Dorrit himself, so dominant in the novel, takes a back seat, in
keeping with the changed gender balance of a different century. Indeed he
commits suicide by (as far as I could tell from the sound effects) jumping into
the canal – something the novel’s Dorrit, so bound up in himself and without
any self-reflection, would never do.

Here we come to the difficulty with this
self-described ‘radical’ adaptation of the novel. I’m not one to attribute
subtlety to Dickens, since in my view his major fault is that he caricatures
rather than characterises. But the great strength of Little Dorrit is its profound exploration of the psychological
damage done by poverty and social degradation, effected principally through the
figure of Dorrit. It is precisely his exploitation of his loving daughter’s
meekness and self-effacement that reveals the depths of his own selfishness,
and more importantly of his self-deception. As Father of the Marshalsea he
assumes a faux-aristocratic position to which others pay homage (and money –
when a new entrant to the prison gives him only coppers instead of silver he is
affronted); yet he is in that position because he is the longest inhabitant –
the longest debtor. That Amy is born in the Marshalsea is a product of that,
and shades of the prison-house lie about her too. She perhaps utters a truth
when she tells Arthur her sister’s verdict, that ‘I had become so used to the
prison that I had its tone and character’. Dickens explores the Marshalsea
world with an eye informed by his own shame at his father’s incarceration there;
what chills most about it is the way it has been normalised. Families live
there along with the debtor, but as Dorrit’s brother Frederick explains to Arthur
on his first visit there, ‘“Anyone can go in ... but it is not everyone who can
go out.”’ It is only when Tip turns from being a ‘volunteer’ to a ‘regular’,
because of his own debt, that the implications of his change of fortune are
ground home. Arthur on his visit misses the moment to leave before the gates
are locked and for a night he experiences the horrors of enforced imprisonment,
spending the night in the Snuggery, a grotesque pastiche of a pub snug in whose
resources ‘the long-initiated Tip.... [took] an awful enjoyment’. Life in the
Marshalsea has corrupted them all, even Little Dorrit, who preserves all sorts
of fictions to keep her father’s self-deception alive. But Amy is also the
conscience of them all; she knows and follows the moral distinctions the others
don’t, even when she connives in preserving their hypocrisy.

All this is lost in making Amy strong from the start,
her father a shadowy background figure, and Arthur as flawed as the rest.
Necessarily much of the detail of the novel, with its vast mass of characters
and its complications of plot, had to be sacrificed in the radio drama. But it
was a shame that the baby of psychological complexity and insight was thrown
out with the bathwater. What it did capture was the hellishness of life at the
bottom (here lived in reverse, at the top of a tower block, with the lifts were
often out of action), where the howling atmospherics of the roof space came to
embody supernatural wolves of the night, in a sonic expression of the ugly, alienating
city. It caught too Amy’s sheer weariness at always being the one to be called
on for help, her deep desire to escape constantly thwarted by the demands on
her by those more feckless than herself.

There is hope at the end (as there is in the fiction),
and an attempt to retain Amy’s female independence, rescued not by her love for
Arthur but by his reformed mother’s
money. In that way the adaptation remains true to the tropes of the nineteenth-century
novel and of Little Dorrit itself – money
saves the day. In our 21st century, Amy heads for university, free
from debt. Now there’s an unlikely happy ending.